LITMIR.BIZ

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near-death experiences. Hadn’t she died in a way? Wasn’t she some wandering spirit?

      For there was no doubt, the Charlotte she had been was no more.

      

      Helena huddled beside her daughter’s bed, her fingers speeding over the rosary beads and her lips moving silently in prayer. The hour was late; the lights were lowered to a dim green in the small, bare hospital room. Someone was moaning in the next room, a low keening sound that failed to arouse the nurses, who were busy preparing for the eleven o’clock shift change. They made eerie shadows on the wall as they passed the door. Throughout Six West there was an uneasy loneliness in the night quiet. Patients and nurses alike shared an unspoken understanding. Everyone was simply trying to get through the night.

      Helena shivered and returned to her prayers. She hated hospitals, would rather die in the streets than return to one. Outside the room a pair of nurses were discussing Charlotte’s case: bandages off today…swelling normal…Percodan for pain on demand. After the medical report, the tone lowered to personal mumbles. Helena’s mouth twisted in annoyance. No doubt they were nattering about Charlotte’s transformation. Everyone on the floor was talking about it.

      Helena shifted her weight, showing the nurses her back, and brought her face within inches of Charlotte’s. Where was her daughter with this new face? She bunched her fist. Who had the right to change it? Certainly not that pompous Dr. Harmon. Guilt rose up like a wave as she recalled her consultation with the doctor prior to surgery. Helena winced, recalling his barely concealed fury.

      “Why haven’t you pursued surgery for Charlotte before now?” he had asked her, his eyes glaring and his tone bordering on an accusation. “These techniques are not new. Certainly she could have avoided years of—” He waved his hand, searching for a word that could possibly describe what Charlotte had endured. No word sufficed. He set his mouth in a grim line.

      She replied with the usual simpered excuses: no money, no insurance, ignorance. Dr. Harmon had shook his head with pity.

      “True, yes, it was all true,” Helena told the sleeping Charlotte, clutching the thin mint green hospital blanket. Helena’s reserve crumbled and she lowered her head upon her daughter’s hand. How effective these little truths were in obscuring the one big Truth. So much more effective than lies. But God knew, she scolded herself. God knew that she was a sinner. And the scourge for her sin had passed on to her daughter.

      “The sin was mine, Lord, not hers,” she prayed. “The blame belongs to me. Perhaps I should have told her. But how?” Her thin fingers, worn dry and brittle by cleaning solvents, spread out to cover her eyes as she wept. “My sin…my sin…” she mumbled. “Mine and Frederic’s, so long ago.”

      

      The first moment Helena saw Frederic Walenski, she knew she loved him. At twenty-six, unmarried and isolated on her family’s farm, her prospects were slim. Life was hard in the late 1960s in Poland. Food prices were rising and salaries were falling. The economy was in an uproar. Helena remembered those years as a time when they struggled just to keep their livestock and family fed.

      Her village sat at the edge of the Carpathian Mountain range, and on weekends young men and women from the cities would flock to the mountains to hike. Helena wasn’t flirtatious, nor did she seek out the attention of the young men who strolled through the village. This Frederic, however, was different. He was more stocky than tall, with thick blond hair and large, insolent eyes. He had a bearing that bordered on haughtiness, that spoke to her of the city, of privilege and of a worldliness unknown in her provincial town. She spotted him while he hovered with his friends over a map, backpacks tilting from their shoulders. While the others pointed and argued what route to take, this handsome man glanced her way. Helena, shocked by her own boldness, didn’t avert her eyes. He returned a knowing glance and a slow, simmering smile. Her blood roiled. She felt a rush like she’d only read about in books.

      Falling in love was easy in the mountains. The air high up was thin and sweet, far from the haze of industrial smoke and revolutionary politics that hovered over the cities. Every weekend Frederic returned to court her, and eventually, Helena did not refuse his kisses. Frederic was so different from anyone she had ever met. Unlike herself, who took the vocational tract in school, Frederic was educated at the University of Warsaw. Where she was politically passive, he was passionately anti-Communist, a rebel who allied himself with protesting students and political organizers who resented Communist attacks on the church and intellectual freedom. On summer nights after making love on the fresh hay of her father’s barn, he wooed her with promises of a golden future, together, in a new Poland. By December, when they sat together near the warmth of the hearth, he murmured in her ear that he loved her. Helena, happier than she’d ever been in her life, believed everything.

      Then late December of 1970 the dream went wrong. She didn’t know exactly what had happened. Frederic’s voice was frantic, and his explanations were garbled and rushed during his last phone call from Warsaw. Something about worker riots over food prices, gunshots and a bomb. He had to leave, quickly. His family had connections and could whisk him out.

      “I must go, Helena,” he’d said urgently, while her hands shook on the telephone. “I must. Now, or risk prison.”

      “No! No, Frederic, you can’t go.”

      “I’ll send for you in America. As soon as I can, I will arrange it.”

      Helena clutched the phone while her heart slammed against her chest. “No! I’ll come with you. I’ll leave right away.”

      “Goodbye, Helena.”

      There was a click and she knew he was gone.

      She’d waited for him as loyally and diligently as any wife would await a husband away at war. For that’s how she saw it. They were married in their hearts, weren’t they? Each day she ran to meet the post, and each day brought a new torrent of tears to find the box empty. One month, two, and not a word came from America. Not a single postcard telling her that he had arrived safely and was waiting for her. At first she convinced herself that he was just being cautious lest the authorities track him down. As the months pushed on, however, she grew more desolate. These feeble excuses would not explain away the growing child within her belly.

      “You disgrace the family!” her mother wailed when she could hide her pregnancy no longer. Devout Catholics, her family couldn’t reconcile the shame, and soon afterward, Helena was sent to the Nuns of the Holy Sacrament in Warsaw.

      The nuns at the convent were kind and sympathetic to her situation. Their eyes blazed with fervor as they assured her that God would forgive her for the sin of fornication if she prayed hard, showed remorse and vowed to sin no more. During the following two months a new calm settled within, one that grew as her baby grew.

      It was then that Father Oziemblowski from her village came to see her. “Good news!” he’d announced. He’d found a family that would adopt her baby. After the birth, Helena could discreetly return home and not another word would be mentioned of this unfortunate affair.

      “You must trust our guidance in these matters,” Father had told her. “For your child’s sake, if not for your own.”

      Helena listened with eyes wide and meek, but in her heart, she balked. Give up Frederic’s child? Unthinkable! Her child was not a bastard. If Frederic was here, they would be married, in a church, blessed by God. Maternal instincts flared, making her cunning.

      As soon as she found an unsupervised moment, she sneaked from the cloister and took the bus to the old section of the city where a row of flat-faced, four-story buildings in stages of disrepair stood shoulder to shoulder before a park, like ancient grande dames sitting in the splendid shade of trees in full bloom. The Walenski apartment was in one of the larger buildings with a grand entryway. After a brief wait, a stylish stocky woman answered the door. Immediately, Helena recognized the same regal haughtiness she had once admired in Frederic, and the same strong, aristocratic nose.

      “I am a friend of Frederic’s,” Helena said, standing tall in her shabby, oversize raincoat. “I was hoping you could help

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